


pleasant company

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 09, Unexpected Visitors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-10
Updated: 2013-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-29 00:55:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/998929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel meets an unfamiliar sibling on the road to Kansas. How blessed he is to have found someone to trust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pleasant company

He’s walking out of a five-and-dime with a stolen bag of Doritos hidden inside his stolen jacket when he hears his name.

“Castiel?”

It doesn’t occur to him to be wary. Maybe it should—after Hael—but he’s been on the road, in and out of cars, eating out of dumpsters, for two weeks now, and no one’s said his name in all that time, and he’s beginning to learn what loneliness feels like. So he stops. Turns.

At first there had been a prickle, with Hael, a feeling in his gut that identified her as _angel,_ but that’s faded now, and when he looks at the young woman who’s called his name, he can’t know her. There’s something very old and bright behind her eyes, though, as if she’s seen things more ancient than her body. He crosses his arms over the bulge of the stolen food.

“Do I know you?” he says.

Her eyes are wide and blue like ice. “I’m Clariel,” she says, breathless, and Cas takes the name and rolls it over in his head— _clahr-ee-el._ Hard, strong _ar,_ practically a weapon in and of itself. “Don’t you remember me?”

The marble of her name rolls and tumbles but doesn’t fit. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t think I do.”

“I’ve heard of you.” She steps closer, and he flinches instinctively, away from the pale reach of her awestruck hand. “You—you were with the Winchesters, weren’t you? Long ago?”

 _Too long._ He swallows the sharp point of pain in his throat, thinking of how many miles there are still to hitchhike and slog across to get back to them. They’re probably waiting for him, wondering where in the hell he got to.

“Yes,” he says.

He looks her up and down—she’s ragged, but she doesn’t look as if Earth is treating her too poorly; her dirty blonde hair looks as if it’s been bleached out a few times, the muscles in her arms strong and lean. Her vessel must be an athlete, he thinks. A fighter. Her face is flushed with something like excitement.

“Come outside,” she says, motioning with one hand, and—having nowhere else to go, no excuse to leave her—he follows.

“Can you tell me what happened?” she says, once they’re out in the parking lot that reeks of gasoline and sun. “I must have been in shock, most of the Fall. I woke up in my vessel in a ditch in Wyoming.” She hunches her shoulders, looking around nervously, though the parking lot is mostly empty, though nothing is near that can hurt her. In the bright October light she looks near-ethereal, as if some remnant of grace is still burning in her. “Everyone I’ve met—all our brothers and sisters—they’re all so scared. None of them trust me.”

Cas stuffs his hands in his pockets—leans sideways. Clariel follows him around the corner of the five-and-dime, into the safe niche of scabbed concrete and shadows beside the dumpster, where it’s quiet, undisturbed.

He sits down on the curb, and she keeps standing, the rips in her jeans level with his eyes.

“Some of them are saying you did it,” she says, softly, as if wary of coming down to his crouch. “That you were the one who cast us all out. It’s not true, is it?”

He looks up at her, her ice eyes shimmering in the sun. There’s hope in the corners of them. But he lied to Hael, and he’s so, so sick of lying to his family.

“I think it is my fault,” he says, “yes.”

He looks at the concrete between his stolen boots, then, fully expecting her to walk away now, to leave in disgust, leave him sitting amongst trash and litter and his own shame.

Instead she shifts her weight to another leg, and he can feel her looking at him, and she doesn’t leave.

“What are you doing, Castiel?” she says, her voice as old and clear as a bell tolling.

Cas raises his eyes to her.

“What?”

“Here, in this store. Where are you going? What are you doing?”

He looks at her for a while, this strange sister. She doesn’t seem angry at him; only a little lost, a little in need of company, maybe. Thoroughly out of place in this parking lot, in this hill-bounded little patch of nowhere, in scuffed-up Converse, blue T-shirt with rhinestones above the heart, but he thinks that maybe she is young; maybe she doesn’t understand the things he’s done. Maybe she’s just waiting for a brother to trust her as much as she’s willing to trust in return.

“I guess I’m trying to get home,” he says.

* * *

 

Clariel has a car; like everything that Cas has to his name, it’s stolen. Her vessel, she says, knows how to drive. Convenient in a time of inconveniences.

She’ll drive him to Lebanon, she says, if he’ll tell her everything. No tricks, no strings attached. And if she gets to meet the Winchesters when they get there, just to see them in the flesh, then she’ll consider any debt to her paid. That’s her deal.

Cas climbs into her passenger seat without much hesitation. She’s a sister, after all. A kind one. It’s dark days; kind sisters are in short supply.

* * *

 

They camp out on the side of a highway, high up on a hillside among damp clusters of trees, and the fire Clariel builds smoulders and smokes but lights up their little patch of grass and pine needles enough. The orange glow of her skin in the firelight is like the sun rising on the Arctic. After she’s stoked it high enough she crosses her legs on the ground and stares into it, and he stares into her, her flickering half-vanishing face behind the flames.

“I bet it’s a long story,” she says, finally. “Will you tell me?”

He swallows, looks down. Night things are chirping in the trees above them.

“I’m not sure where to start.”

“Is it true that you stopped the Apocalypse?” she says. She looks up at him. Sparks course and careen in the reflection of her eyes, like fireflies trapped in their glassy ice. “With the Winchesters?”

He twists his lip wryly, a sort of smile. “I thought everyone in Heaven knew that.”

She shrugs. “I was never on the front lines. I only heard stories.”

“It wasn’t me,” he says. “It was all them. I only helped, or tried to.”

“I was told you died.”

His smile begins to feel dark on his face. “More than once.”

Clariel picks up a stick, pushes it into the embers, stirring them up. A great crush of flaming ash rises into the sky, prickles, dims out.

“But you keep coming back,” she says, her pale brow furrowing. Shadows clamour between her eyes. “Why is that?”

“Unlucky, I guess.”

“Luckier than some.”

“I’m afraid you’ll think badly of me if I tell you what happened,” he says. Lately his guilt has been wrapped around his throat at the point where it was cut, where his grace bled out, like a necklace, or a ribbon worn to hide defect, and he’s almost surprised she can’t see it, can’t pick that blemish out when she looks at him. “You’re here—you’re all here—because of me.”

She doesn’t say anything. He can’t quite understand the feeling of her gaze on him—can’t tell if it’s accusing, sympathetic. If it says anything at all.

“I was foolish,” he says, listening to his own voice winding and twining with the crackle of the fire, with the rattle of the night things in the trees. “I’ve hurt so many of you, so irreparably. I don’t know what to do to make it right.”

“Some things can’t be made up for,” Clariel says, and he can feel her eyes like pins, sticking him into place, though her voice is flat as tundra. “That’s just the way it is.”

“I still need to try.” The ground is wet, uncomfortable beneath him; he shifts closer to the fire, aware, acutely, of the gooseflesh on his arms.

“Is that why you’re going back to them? The Winchesters?”

“They’ll know what to do,” he says, more to himself now than her. The sky is so heavy and vast above him, he feels, suddenly, and he wishes he still had a phone, wishes he could even remotely hear the sound of Dean’s voice in the waves of the ether—but Dean’s as silent as the grace of his siblings, shut away from him now, like dark lanterns, closed windows. “They’ll know what to say. They always do.”

“Your love for them is infamous,” says Clariel, quietly. “They must be very special, if our Father keeps returning you to them.”

“They’re my goodness,” he says, finding her eyes, finally, meeting their coldness without fear.

* * *

 

Clariel sits up standing guard while Cas sleeps, and as fuzzy dawn is blooming over the hilltop he trades places with her, sitting with his knees up, facing the road, while she curls up on an outspread sweatshirt on the ground. He sees the bulge of a knife beneath her jeans, while he is waiting for the sun to rise, looks at it while she turns over in her sleep, her hair tangled with twigs and pine needles. He wonders sadly how many times she’s been attacked by humans or frightened siblings since she landed in that ditch in Wyoming, how many times she’s needed that knife.

Any number, he thinks, is too many.

* * *

 

It takes them two more days to cross the Kansas border, and every night they camp out in the wastelands and wilderlands, crouched around Clariel’s fires, and he tells her as much as he can bear to—mentions Metatron while her eyes grow wide and enthralled, feels a pang of solitude when he names Naomi and gets no response from her. And why should he? She’s probably been nothing but a model soldier her whole life long; no need for her to ever know of the likes of Naomi.

He tells her about the Winchesters, too—is almost glad of how many questions she asks about them. Talking about Sam and Dean makes his heart feel lighter, and with every mile of road her car eats up he feels it growing lighter still—one more mile closer to them, to being home with them, to being guided by them.

Some things he keeps private—his fear for Sam; his longing for the sound of Dean’s voice. He misses them so much he thinks he could burst, and never more so than when he’s trying to sleep in the itchy grass at nighttime, watching the flash of the fire in Clariel’s angel-blade while she keeps watch. She twirls it constantly, her ice-eyes scouring the darkness, ready to spring and strike at anything that would harm them.

She’s quiet during the day. The radio in her car is almost always set to Scan, never settling on any station in particular, as if she can’t decide what she wants to hear. She has a talent for stealing food, it turns out; more than once he watches her go into a gas station empty-handed and come back out with pockets and boot-legs and sleeves stuffed full of things to eat, as if she’s been stealing from humans for years. She lifts money, too, off any unsuspecting passerby, enough to get them the next forty miles through every stretch of wilderness, and when he asks how she learned to be so good at thievery, she shrugs.

“Must be my vessel,” she says. “I’m hardly complaining.”

For his part, he watches the countryside speed by, admires the blur of trees and plains and mountains, the flattening of the world into the prairies, imagining— _daydreaming,_ really, is the human term, he supposes—the moment when he’ll land on the doorstep of the bunker, how he’ll greet the brothers, how they might greet him—tries to imagine introducing Clariel to them, imagining her face lighting up. He can never tell whether she admires them or not, from his stories (and he has so many), but she listens, rapt, whenever their names pass his lips.

How blessed he is, he thinks, that he’s found someone like her; of all the family that’s been cast down, how lucky to have stumbled across a sister who only wants to help him. She drives towards Lebanon as if it’s her only purpose, as if getting him back home to the people he loves is all she needs to do in this world. He supposes it must feel good for someone like her—motivated for the first time since the doors of her home slammed behind her. At least, he hopes it does.

“Why are you helping me?” he asks her, too curious to keep quiet anymore, two days out from Lebanon. “I’ve done nothing of worth for you.”

She smiles with one corner of her mouth, watches him for a long time.

“Curiosity,” she says, eventually. “I’ve heard so much about you—I can’t lose an opportunity to know you, Castiel. You’ve done so much.”

He accepts it; it’s as much an answer as he’s ever gotten out of her. He feels her watching him when he lies down to sleep that night, looking up at the stars wheeling, turning, over his head.

* * *

 

She only begins to scare him when the following night falls, when they’re parked beneath an overpass and he’s lying on the slanted concrete listening to cars rumble by above him. She’s down at her car, sifting through her trunk, and when he sits up to ask her something, he catches a glimpse of a mass of metal within.

“Are those guns?” he asks, when she climbs the concrete again, her Converse slipping and skidding on the rough cement. “Whose car did you steal?”

Clariel shrugs. “Good to have them, though. This world is dangerous.” She looks at him hard. “Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me? We’re not powerful here anymore.”

He begins to feel uneasy in the pit of his stomach, shifts a little away from her. There’s no fire tonight and all he can see in the distant glare of passing headlights is the coldness of her eyes, the glass marble of them, the glimmer of her angel-blade in her hand.

“You still have grace,” he says. “I don’t, but you do. You’re far more protected than I am.”

“It never hurts to be safe.”

He can’t find the edge of her face in the dark, but when she turns her profile to him he thinks he sees something _almost_ familiar, _almost_ remembered—but it’s lost when she looks back at him again.

“Honestly, Castiel,” she says, as if she can read his mind, his uncertainty, “are you _sure_ we’ve never met?” And he sees her tiger-grin, white as moon.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think so.” But now, suddenly, he’s not so sure, and when she goes down into the underground starlight to sit on the trunk of her stolen car and keep watch, he thinks of the weapons beneath her, and wonders if she knows she’s probably snatched a hunter’s vehicle. What other explanation could there be for an arsenal like that?

He thinks of the familiar mess inside the Impala’s trunk, misses it so desperately and suddenly he feels tears come to his eyes, and he turns his body in the direction of Lebanon, hoping Sam and Dean can feel how close he is, how near he is to coming home.

* * *

 

Her silence on that last day is no longer comforting, no longer normal. It feels freakish, as if she’s poised for something, and Castiel feels himself pushing into the door of her car, trying surreptitiously to sit as far away from her as possible. Her pale face grows almost wild the closer they draw to Lebanon, and as soon as they reach a town he asks carefully if he can stop to make a call, and he feels her watching him from the driver’s seat as he half-jogs to the pay-phone at the corner of a Gas-n-Sip and uses the last of his quarters to dial Dean’s number.

He waits, anxiously, trying to ignore the prickle on the back of his neck, but Dean doesn’t pick up.

Disheartened, he hangs the phone up, stands there for a long time. Suddenly he wants anything but to climb back into Clariel’s car. Lebanon’s not far. He can hitchhike the rest of the way, be rid of her, her strange car, her strange chill.

He goes back to the car, taps on the window; she rolls it down.

“Thank you,” he says, trying to sound nonchalant, unworried, “but I think I can make it the rest of the way myself. You’ve been a great help to me, sister.”

She frowns. “But you promised I could meet the Winchesters.” She leans forward, looking down the road, and then looks back at him, all wide eyes and innocence. “If I don’t meet them then you’re in debt to me, still, and I don’t want that, do you?”

“You’ve done enough, Clariel,” he says, and her name feels _so_ bizarre on his tongue; something about it just isn’t right. “If there’s anything I can ever do for you in the future—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, gives a heartless laugh. “It’s not that much further, we’ll be there before evening. Just get in.”

She lifts her hand from the steering wheel, grips his wrist as if she could yank him into the car with her if she only tried.

“Please, Castiel,” she says through bitten teeth. “It’s my pleasure.”

He thinks of the knife hidden beneath her jeans, feels the tightness of her slim, pretty fingers on him, and knows he doesn’t really have a choice.

* * *

 

He wracks his brains in those last four hours, trying with all his might to figure out how he knows her.

He _must._ She’d asked if he remembered her—had he wronged her, once, long ago? Is that why she’s so bent on sticking to him like glue, at getting him to own up to his sins? _Clariel, Clariel—_ it’s not a name that sparks anything in him, and he’s always prided himself on knowing his family, vast as it once was.

Half of him thinks that surely he must be paranoid; the same half reminds him with every passing minute that soon he’ll be home, home with Sam and Dean, and he can be rid of her. But the other half tilts away from her as far as it can, instinctively disturbed by her, by the outline of the blade against her leg.

He can hear her angel-blade rattling across the back-seat, rolling side to side. It almost feels as if the point of it is aimed at the back of his neck.

But then they pass the green government sign for Lebanon and he feels his heart calming its beat, and he shifts, unable to keep the excitement from his body. He watches the lights passing, trying to search out the smokestacks of the bunker from the quickly-falling night, knowing he won’t be able to see them but hoping anyway—the daydream of Dean pulling him into his arms, of Sam clapping him on the shoulder, films over his eyes in a haze, and he smiles despite himself, looking out at Kansas passing.

He doesn’t notice Clariel’s pulled over until the engine grinds to a halt.

He pauses, looks at her, the fear of her climbing back into his throat again, slowly. His heartbeat rising one pulse at a time.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just need to rest a minute,” she says, staring straight ahead.

Nervous, truly nervous, now, Cas turns to face forward in his seat again, listening to cars push past, rocking them on their own wheels. He swallows. The silence is oppressive.

“I meant to ask you,” he says, finally, needing to break the quiet—it’s becoming frightening, unsettling, and it feels better to speak. “What kind of a name is Clariel? I’ve never heard it before.”

 _Clahr-ee-el._ She hums a little sigh, shifts in her seat a moment; then she unbuckles her belt and leans over the seat, hunting for something in the mess in the back. He’s frozen, unwilling to move lest her wildness show its face.

She was, he realises abruptly, a very bad idea.

“You don’t like it?” she says.

“It’s a lovely name,” he says, voice shivering in his throat, cold as ice. “Just unfamiliar.”

“Well, if you like,” she says—

—and then the chill of her blade is against his throat, held loose and comfortably in her pale icy hand—and he feels his heart begin to sink, horrible, into his stomach, looking out at the black road, unable to move—

“If you like,” she says, “you can call me Claire.” And her tiger-smile is terrible, and white, white as moon.


End file.
